Impact of Abdominal and Thigh Intermuscular Adipose Tissue on Glucose and Cardiometabolic Risk in Adults With Obesity

Figures

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  Figure 1.. Magnetic resonance imaging. Panels A and B illustrate mid-thigh composition in a woman (49 years of age—A) and a man (45 years of age—B) with a mid-thigh total area of around 350 cm2. Panels C and D illustrate abdominal composition in a woman (39 years of age—C) and a man (49 years of age—D) with an abdominal total volume of around 7000 cm3. Subcutaneous adipose tissue, IMAT, and skeletal muscle tissue are typically quantified in these axial images, and multiple axial images can be quantified to provide tissue volumes. Abbreviations: IMAT, intermuscular adipose tissue.

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  Figure 2.. Associations between abdominal/mid-thigh IMAT with 24-hour (A), diurnal (B), and nocturnal mean glucose levels (C); HOMA-IR (D); and cardiometabolic risk score (E). Shading indicates the 95% confidence intervals of the associations. Bold correlations indicate statistically significant associations (P < .05). Abbreviations: HOMA-IR, homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance; IMAT, intermuscular adipose tissue.

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  Figure 3.. Impact of low vs high abdominal-to-mid-thigh IMAT ratio on 24-hour (A), diurnal (B), and nocturnal mean glucose levels (C); HOMA-IR (D); and cardiometabolic risk score (E). Data are displayed by Gardner–Altman plots, which show a representation of observed values by the 2-group comparison (low abdominal/mid-thigh IMAT ratio and high abdominal/mid-thigh IMAT ratio), a bootstrap effect size (Cohen's d) estimation, mean, and 95% confidence interval. Two-sided P-values from a parametric (holistic) or nonparametric (LOWESS) analysis of covariance evaluating the differences between groups while adjusting for sex, except for the cardiometabolic risk score, for which we performed a Krustal–Wallis analysis of variance. Abbreviations: HOMA-IR, homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance; IMAT, intermuscular adipose tissue.